Gary K. Wolfe: Take One

Looking over an assortment of year-end reviews and “best of the year” lists, not only in the Locus February issue, but in various websites, blogs, newspapers, and even Amazon.com, I’ve become convinced that the most useful purpose of such lists is not to end discussions, but to begin them. So we’re hoping that this new interactive venture for Locus can do just that—starting with a look at the past year, and later moving on to other topics…

But I should confess up front that I may not be the best reviewer to kick things off. I’ve never been comfortable with “best” lists or best-of-year prizes in the first place, since two questions immediately come to mind: Who do we think we are? and Whose best is it, anyway? The answer to the first question is easy: I think it’s fair to say that those of us contributing to this blog have read a lot of stuff over a lot of years, have written about it for a good while, and can lay some claim to having some linear perspective and some basis for comparisons.

The second question is harder to dismiss. To claim a title as the best SF or fantasy novel of the year seems to me to imply a core readership with a common set of values and assumptions, but as far as I can tell that readership has been dismembering itself into various caucuses for several decades now. A half-century ago, a dedicated SF reader could cover the major magazines and nearly all the major novels and anthologies in a given year. In 1955, the New York Times reported that 74 science fiction titles had been published the previous year (they may have missed some small press titles, but not a lot); for 2008, Locus reports having listed 1,669 new titles in SF, fantasy, horror, and its various cross-pollinations. There were 254 SF novels and 436 fantasy novels alone. Anyone who actually tried to read all of those probably needs a hug, but isn’t someone I want to be trapped in a bar with for very long.

Instead, there are a lot of readerships, coming at all this from a lot of different angles and with a lot of different assumptions. This is an altogether healthy development, but it means that no one’s best list is going to please everyone, or even be comprehensible to everyone.

So I decided to take a slightly different tack, focusing for this first post on SF novels. I decided to take the central thesis from that most over-masticated and misrepresented of intellectual histories, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, with its notions of “normal” vs. “revolutionary” science. The striking thing about “normal” scientific processes, he says, is “how little they aim to produce major novelties, conceptual or phenomenal.” Revolutionary science, in his famous term that has since been appropriated for everything from management texts to diet books, represents an entire “change of paradigm,” a rethinking of possibilities from the ground up. Contrary to popular representations, Kuhn doesn’t dismiss normal science as outmoded—it’s where most of the work gets done, and it gets back to work even after the change of paradigm.

The question, then, is: which of last year’s novels best represent “normal” SF, which aspire most successfully to revolutionary SF, and which seem to represent a successful middle ground? Needless to say, I’ve got a candidate for each.

My candidate for 2008’s most successful performance of normal SF is Paul McAuley’s The Quiet War. In terms of the familiar literary merits of character, plot, and style, it’s one of his very best novels—but as SF it’s essentially conservative, representing a 23rd-century interplanetary war of the sort we’ve seen often before, but seldom with such attention to current science and such political and psychological acumen. For revolutionary SF, my candidate is Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, which may draw on a number of familiar SF tropes, but which seems to violate nearly every principle we’ve inherited about what SF usually is—in terms not only of its massive length, its leisurely pacing (at least in the opening few hundred pages), its language, its humor, its preoccupations with systems, puzzles, and entire philosophical systems for their own sake. Like much revolutionary science, it may take some years for us to realize its full effect on the field, as people actually begin to finish it.

For the best synthesis of these two types, I’d nominate Greg Bear’s City at the End of Time, which pointedly alludes to earlier traditions from Hodgson to Clarke to Stapledon, but which recombines these in a way that is utterly contemporary. Bear isn’t “doing” any of these forebears in the sense of pastiche, but rather is showing us, in an almost metafictional way, how their ideas and images can be reinvented for a kind of SF that is both hauntingly familiar and energetically innovative.

I’ll stop there, but I suspect that much the same could be done with fantasy novels. I’m fairly confident that one of my favorite fantasy novels of the year, Michael Swanwick’s The Dragons of Babel, occupies a kind of middle ground between normal and revolutionary fantasy, analogous to the Bear novel in SF. But maybe it’s really revolutionary fantasy, and if it’s not, what is? As a whole, Paul Park’s masterful Roumania quartet seemed to offer a whole new way of reading fantasy, but most of that happened in earlier volumes, prior to last year’s concluding The Hidden World. And it seemed to me that a novel such as Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book represents a first-rate performance of what is essentially a normal fantasy, but there may be other candidates as well.

Or is this whole paradigm business not working out? I’ll cheerfully engage with anyone’s alternative system for sorting out the important books of last year, but you’re going to have to pin me down with a clever wrestling maneuver to get me to unconditionally name a single best novel of the year. My answer to that question is always going to be the same: I don’t know, and you don’t either.

10 thoughts on “Gary K. Wolfe: Take One”

A change in Paradigm in science means a change in understanding, which usually leads to a change in how the world works or is perceived and studied. In other words, progress. Does literature progress? I don’t think so.

Why are we talking about books, anyway? In my experience,it’s musicians who talk about books, while movie people talk about music. Aren’t we supposed to be talking about movies?

Progress is a tough word to define in the arts, even tougher than in the sciences, where at least there can be some semi-objective criteria to measure against… But I do think literature or art can change the way the world is perceived — it certainly has for me.

And finally — loved your letter in the NY Times today, Terry. I nearly spat out my coffee!

While I especially agree with “I don’t know, and you don’t either,” I’ll happily nitpick on something else.

Kuhn’s “Revolutionary” stuff… shouldn’t that happen only ~once per generation, say once every twenty years or so? Wouldn’t we be diluting the category if we managed to find a handful of such works every year? Or do these “revolutions” really happen in such slow motion in sf/f?

I’m very happy with there being multiple readerships. It helps me find other ways of reading books. And given that those multiple readerships exist, I’m very happy to see different “best of” lists, because they provide a useful guide to that variation.

Hi, Karen! Yeah, that Kuhnian business only stretches so far in talking about lit, and the point of it was just to get an angle a little different from the “these are my favorites” approach. It occurred to me after reading something Gardner wrote (by way of introducing a Greg Egan story) about “those seminal stories that change the history of SF by changing the way that other science fiction writers think about the future.” I think there have been stories like that, but probably not every year.

I really like “best of” lists because I can’t read everything that is published i SF during a year. These are guides. I have my favorite critics (meaning they agree most with my likes and dislikes) and follow them fairly clearly. It helps me to choose what to read and what not to read. I will miss some really good works because of that – but I read a lot of great ones, as well.

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